Monday, 29 August 2016

Flight Path - On Reading David Fleming's 'Surviving the Future'

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous
civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories
about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

The man you might not know. And yet if you know anything about the Green
Party, Trade Energy Quotas, the Transition Movement, New Economics
Foundation or the Soil Association you would have met his ideas and his
vision many times. His name is David Fleming and for thirty years he
carried a large manuscript around with him, amending, adding, editing
and re-editing, as each year progressed. This September, six years after
his sudden death, it sees the light of day in the form of two books.

The
future is a fraught place for those of us who have realised over the last
decade we are boarded on the Titanic and heading for a mighty reality
check. Some of us have thrown up our hands in horror and despair, some
of us have heroically dug gardens, some of us have analysed fossil fuel
graphs and turned off our central heating. Most of of us have looked at
this wicked problem and tried to work out what on earth is needed now,
not as individuals but as a people. One thing is for sure, at some point
this all-powerful ship will founder and David Fleming's clear proposals
for an alternative social organisation are welcome reading for all
those whose eyes are trained on the lifeboats, rather than the dancing
girls in the bar.

Slack and elegance

Surviving the Future is a linear pathway through Lean Logic's diverse and visionary eco-system. Where you might – and indeed are encouraged to –
explore the larger work's interconnected range of entries, the small
volume keeps you on the main track. Here I am on the 16:00 from
Liverpool Street coming home, surrounded by shopping bags and folk
staring at their mobile phones, listening to music, eating fast food,
wrapped up in their own worlds, and it is hard to imagine that all this
might shift into the scenarios David is describing in these pages. And
yet it is compelling in ways you do not expect. Even though there are
fascinating insights on the more familiar subjects of religion, myth and
culture-making, the chapters that grab the attention are undoubtedly
those on lean economics, specifically the seven points of protocol which
pull in an entirely different direction to the conditions in which the
globalised market economy flourishes; the latter which is driven by
competition and price and the former which works in an entirely
different paradigm.

Economics is not a subject that most of us
care about. However, the market economy is a system and creed we live by
and has put us on this collision course. We are all embedded within it
as we sit in this train carraige rocking through the East Anglian barley
fields. Clear thinking about this behomoth and how it might be replaced
are paramount – and you could have no more inspired or radical guide than David Fleming in this uncertain territory.

For
Fleming a viable future means being rooted in the small-scale local
economy and cultivating the resilience of the community you live in. It
means creating a thriving culture that will enable people to use their
native intelligence and good will to work out how to proceed when the
chips are down and the social and technological infrastuctures we take
for granted are no longer in place. His premise is that through time
localised, interdependant communities have been the norm and that our
hyper-individualised hyper-urbanised lives are an anomoly and only made
possible because of a destructive oil-based growth economy.

The book looks at key areas, such as food, growth, ethics, employment and waste, through the lens of lean
times, and proposes that intead of living in a mono-culture where the
price is the measure of everything, we live in a community, where our presence, our loyalty to its shape and interactions matter.

It
is a better book to read in the garden, where there is space to
breathe. Because, above all things, the book brings space and
intelligence and wit to areas that are normally written about in
lumbering opinionated prose. In a genre weighted down by tribalism,
righteousness, political rhetoric and scientific data, his words come
like a fresh breeze. Where other books would feature graphs, he has
woodcuts of the English countryside.Where others might beat you over the
head, his light and precise use of language effortlessly guides you
from high altitude systems thinking to the utterly miserable times
endured by the workers of the ancient 'hydraulic' cultures.

At
some points his references to art and philosophy may appear old-fashioned,
his fondness for the feast-days of the Middle Ages romantic, but the
main theme is utterly modern, thought-provoking and often surprising. At
the suggestion we might employ Christanity's rich liturgy and
architecture as a cultural holding place, I find myself exposulating to
the runner beans. Hang on a minute, David, when the Church of England is
on a all-time attendance low in the UK? Are you suggesting we go
backwards and have to worship gods again?

I
put the book down and dive into some shade between the buddleia and the
rasp- berry canes. Above me the scarlet admiral and peacock butterflies
drink the nectar from the flowers, the light shining through their
jewelled wings, above them on a southerly breeze the seeds of a black
poplar drift by in search of new territory and above them a marsh
harrier circles in the updrift, soaring higher and higher.

OK, so how do
you organise society in the absence of competitive pricing? I laugh.
This book is subtle! I have no idea: but it is a very good question. One
that revolves around loving the earth and sky, that's for sure. It has
to start here. It has to start with this moment.

I reach out to
pick several large raspberries and realise that it was Fleming's ideas
about community resilience that had entirely forged my own. These canes
from Rita and Nick and Jeannie, the apple trees from Gemma and my fellow
writers on Playing for Time,
all these vegetables from seed swaps, my clothes from Give and Take
Days, my involvement with Dark Mountain via the Transition movement.
Everything in my house and larder and woodpile, in my relationships with
neighbours and local shopkeepers, with this sandy, salty, wild
territory, has come here through the informal economy. In all these
small ways I am already living in the future he describes. And in that I
know I am not alone.

This shift is not just personal, about me
and my downshift style: it is social, about nurturing communities of
'reciprocity and freedom'. And this is where this book acts as a
decisive catalyst. We need deep blue sky thinking, to ask ourselves
questions we have never thought about with rigour, to look around us at
what we have now between us, a bird's eye perspective, because if we
can't we will be surely engulfed by the struggle on the ground:

The task is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic – and indeed benevolence –
still exist. It is to join up the remnants of local culture that
survive and give it the chance to get its confidence back. We now need
to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often
passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy sense of the
story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where
you are, and who is there with you...

But given this is the one alternative that
resonates, that makes sense, it is worth giving it our every last
creative shot. If you are prepared mentally, physically, emotionally,
for a different world and have deintensified your way of life,
you are resilient and fluid in a way folk that have never thought about
these things are not. That makes you a valuable presence in any kind of
climacteric, a flexible open agent within a close, rigid
system. I realise this late summer day, the lean localised future so
astutely and elegantly mapped out in these pages was the future I chose a
long time ago, and the task Fleming sets all writers and artists takes
us resolutely out of the sidelines and puts us right where the action is
– and where else, given the choice, would we want to be?

Carnival

At the upcoming Dark Mountain gathering this week
we are delighted to welcome Shaun Chamberlin, David Fleming's close
friend and associate, who will be holding a workshop exploring some of
his core ideas, and also to be able to sell both books, hot off the
press, at our book stall (£30 and £10 respectively, or £35 for the two
).

I like to think David Fleming would have enjoyed Base Camp, at
seeing a future-thinking culture being created by people aware of the
impending social and economic crises. He might have recognised the lean
thinking amongst its strands of myth-making, food growing,
knowledge-sharing, music and conviviality. Celebrations and convergences
are the bedrock for a society he envisioned could survive and thrive in
a rocky future, and it is in this spirit that we publish a short
extract from his chapter on Carnival, edited by Shaun and originally
published in Dark Mountain Issue 5.

Extract from the late Dr. David Fleming's Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (2016). Extensive references are given in the dictionary itself, but are omitted here.* points to another entry in the dictionary.

Carnival.
Celebrations of music, dance, torchlight, mime, games, feast and folly
have been central to the life of *community for all times other than
those when the pretensions of large-scale civilisation descended like a
frost on public joy.

The decline of carnival in the West began in
earnest alongside the transition from a rural-centred culture to a
city-centred one. There were many reasons. The early stirrings of
capitalism encouraged habits of soberness, and it has this fixation
about people turning up for work on Monday morning. Some carnivals were
getting out of control, becoming the starting-point for rebellion and
riot: Robin Hood’s career began as a carnival king; Ben Kett’s rebellion
in 1549 started in Wymondham at a festival for St.Thomas à Becket. And
the invention of fire-arms had its effect: it meant, of course, that a
reckless crowd could also be dangerous, but – more important than that –
it introduced a need for discipline, especially in armies. The loading
and firing of a musket is complicated; it requires a sequence of steps –
forty-three of them, according to Prince Maurice of Orange’s “drill” –
each of which must be done exactly, at speed, and (on occasion) under
fire. Discipline becomes critical: sober *citizenship, which is good for
armies, and good for trade, calls for self-awareness and self-control,
and it gets lost in the spontaneous exuberance of carnival.

Carnival
has been subdued, and its loss is serious. The modern market economy
suffers from play-deprivation. It does exist to a weakened extent in
sport, but even there the aim of winning is increasingly taken as the
literal purpose of the event rather than the enabling *myth. When such
critical cultural assets as *trust, *social capital and the *humour
which blunts insult are in decline, *play is in trouble. Insult and
rough-and-tumble are now largely forbidden; if an invitation to play is
rejected or misconstrued, if a joke goes wrong, there is shame or worse.

It
invites the bleak question: 'What is the point?' The consequences are
various, no doubt, but among them may be loneliness, boredom, anxiety
and depression; if society is less fun, its inequalities are more
resented. There is no constant reminder of the teeming vitality beneath
the surface of other people; there is a loss of authority by the local
community, which becomes less audible, less visible, less alive, less
fertile as a source of laughter. Barbara Ehrenreich wonders whether the
waning of carnival might have had something to do with the awareness of
depression which, in the early seventeenth century, seems to have
developed almost on the scale of a pandemic. Before then there was, of
course, pain, and grief – all the dark emotions – but loneliness and
anxiety...? *Tactile deprivation (the sadness of not being touched)...?
The sense of the party being over...?

… Homer tells us how the art
of the ancient dream world lay in wait to seduce Odysseus and his crew
as they were about to encounter the Sirens, whose bewitching song lures
everyone who hears it to their death, their bodies added to the pile of
mouldering skeletons in the meadow where the Sirens sat. On the advice
of his mistress, Circe, the goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea,
Odysseus stopped up the ears of his crew with wax, so that, unable to
hear the song, they were not distracted from the real work of rowing. He
himself, being securely strapped to the mast, could now listen to the
Sirens' voices 'with enjoyment', as Circe puts it, and without being
drawn irresistibly into their power. This has various interpretations,
but one of them makes it a decisive detachment from art: the sound of
ancient myth which once drew its hearers in, without means of escape, is
rendered sensible and civilised, reduced to a concert, a sort of
Hellenic musical evening with female chorus and a professor of Greek to
tell us something about the local legend that lies behind it.

On
this view we see the breaking of the link between art (music, in this
case) and politics: now you only need to buy your ticket, be a spectator
of the arts for an hour or so, and then home for herb tea and bed.'
--Images: David Fleming on Hampstead Heath by Henrik Dahle. All woodcuts from Lean Logic - A Dictionory for the Future and How to Survive It edited by Shaun Chamberlin and published by Chelsea Green on 8th September.

about this blog

Welcome to my blog - a collection of pieces written for collaborative platforms and grassroots media, including The Dark Mountain Project, This Low Carbon Life, Transition Network, EarthLines and the Grassroots Directory.